The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.

If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users. If they want to publicize what they have done, fine. By all means, do so. If there are good reasons not to release the modified code, that's fine with me, too.

The license still remains open enough for any moaner out there to improve the damn thing. How many forks and minix based distros out there ? Obviously it's not Andrew's fault if nobody cares but Intel.

With this kind of license there is zero guarantee that you can get to the code. Of course things have been modified and adapted.

Yes, but this may be the lessor of two problems. Even if Intel provided the code, we still wouldn't be able to bypass the hardware restrictions that prevent us from using binaries built with that source code.

If owners had a way to install their own code for the cpu's management engine, then there would undoubtedly be enough interest from open source communities to do so independently of intel's code. In addition to minux, it's extremely likely someone would do a linux port and I'm sure there would be a great deal of interest from the formally verified kernel camp like sel4. 3rd party solutions (ie dd-wrt) are often even better in terms of security, features, and support than the original, provided that we're not locked out.